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The Imminent Demise of SORBS
An anonymous reader lets us know about the dire straits the SORBS anti-spam blacklist finds itself in. According to a notice posted on the top page, long-time host the University of Queensland has “decided not to honor their agreement with… SORBS and terminate the hosting contract.” The post, signed “Michelle Sullivan (Previously known as Matthew Sullivan),” says that the project needs either to “find alternative hosting for a 42RU rack in the Brisbane area of Queensland Australia” or to find a buyer. Offers are solicited for the assets of SORBS as an ongoing anti-spam service — it’s now handling over 30 billion DNS queries per day. An update to the post says “A number of offers have already been made, we are evaluating each on their own merits.” Failing a successful resolution, SORBS will cease operations on July 20, 2009 at 12 noon Brisbane time. Such a shutdown could slow or disrupt anti-spam efforts for large numbers of mail hosts worldwide.
Boingo Awarded a Patent For Hotspot Access
Boingo has scored a patent for accessing a Wi-Fi hotspot by a mobile device. The patent, no. 7,483,984, was issued in January, but Boingo only started talking about it recently. The patent application was filed in December 2002. According to the company, the methods covered by the patent include: “…accessing wireless carrier networks by mobile computing devices, where a client software application hosted by the device accesses carrier networks using wireless access points. For example, when a computer — or netbook, smartphone or any other Wi-Fi-enabled device — is in a location where there are multiple signals, the patented technology looks at each signal and alerts the user which signal will work, showing the signal as an understandable name and ID for the user.The patent covers all wireless technologies and spectrums, as well as any mobile device that access wireless hotspots.” The company is not saying anything about whether or how they will attempt to wield this patent.
The Imminent Demise of SORBS
An anonymous reader lets us know about the dire straits the SORBS anti-spam blacklist finds itself in. According to a notice posted on the top page, long-time host the University of Queensland has “decided not to honor their agreement with… SORBS and terminate the hosting contract.” The post, signed “Michelle Sullivan (Previously known as Matthew Sullivan),” says that the project needs either to “find alternative hosting for a 42RU rack in the Brisbane area of Queensland Australia” or to find a buyer. Offers are solicited for the assets of SORBS as an ongoing anti-spam service — it’s now handling over 30 billion DNS queries per day. An update to the post says “A number of offers have already been made, we are evaluating each on their own merits.” Failing a successful resolution, SORBS will cease operations on July 20, 2009 at 12 noon Brisbane time. Such a shutdown could slow or disrupt anti-spam efforts for large numbers of mail hosts worldwide.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A Simple Twitter App with Ruby on Rails – Messages With Ajax
Ruby on Rails is a web application framework that promotes rapid development. Clients’ demands are ever increasing yet they still expect the same quality of output. In the first part of this three part series, we cover setting up a simple message model, which will hold the messages posted. Further to this, we will learn how to post a message asynch
Apple Chief Steve Jobs Spotted at Work
Apple Inc Chief Executive Steve Jobs was at the company’s headquarters on Monday, underscoring speculation the pancreatic cancer survivor may have returned to work.
Cisco: Smart Grid May Be 1000 times larger than the Internet
There’s been plenty of hype about the Smart Grid — some justified and some not. But the gold award for Smart Grid hype has to go to Cisco, whose spokesperson last month said that the grid could end up being up to 1,000 times the size of the Internet.
Myspace Reducing International Staff, Closing Offices
Damn you, Facebook and Twitter. Damn You!
The Web Designer’s Guide to Cloud Hosting
Cloud computing is quietly taking over the world and changing the way we use our computers forever. Whether you’re storing your photo collection on Flickr or logging on to Gmail, everyone’s now using the cloud, even if they don’t realize it. But how does it work and how can we as web designers and developers make it work for us?
How to Refresh an Old Desktop
The recession and the tight credit situation are combining to make it more attractive to fix up an old computer, because a three- or four-year-old PC can be rejuvenated fairly easily.
Predicting SCO’s Actions Post Bankruptcy
eldavojohn writes “SCO lost last year and began the bankruptcy filings a long time ago but PJ has some speculative bad news on what they retain through the bankruptcy proceedings. SCO proposes to sell a number of assets to an outfit called UnXis, which PJ characterizes this way: ‘It starts to hint that this is more a renaming, taking in some new management who seem to have financial expertise, and SCO keeps skipping along as unXis, with the dangerous litigation spun off safely into a litigation troll.’ In their filings SCO says they retain ‘their litigation and related claims against International Business Machines Corporation, Novell, Inc., AutoZone Corporation, Red Hat and certain Linux users which are not material customers of UnXis (excluding certain large-scale users of Linux servers) that are claimed to have infringed against UNIX copyrights.’ So that’s still a possibility they could go after anyone who is a ‘certain Linux user.’ And what’s even worse is that they’ll retain a patent for running multiple Java applications on a single Java virtual machine. We may not be out of the SCO litigation woods yet.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
